The Robber Barons: The Classic Account of the Influential Capitalists Who Transformed America's Future

Summary

“The best, the liveliest and most illuminating” account of Rockefeller, Morgan, and the other men who seized American economic power after the Civil War (The New Republic).

John D. Rockefeller, J. P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, E. H. Harriman, Jay Gould, Henry Clay Frick . . . their names carry a powerful historical ring, still echoing today in the countless institutions that are part of their legacy, from universities to museums to banks. But who were the people behind the legends, and how did they rise to their positions of vast wealth and influence in the latter half of the nineteenth century?

The Robber Barons is a classic work on the financiers and industrialists of the Gilded Age, who shaped their own era as well as the future of the United States—“not a mere series of biographies but a genuine history” (The New York Times Book Review).

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Josephson, Matthew, 1899–1978.

The robber barons: the great American capitalists, 1861–1901 by Matthew Josephson.

Foreword

The Robber Barons was written during that Great Slump which, beginning in 1929, reached its lowest depths in 1929–1933. The New Era of Prosperity had ended; the captains and the kings of industry were, some of them, departing; and we were asking ourselves insistently how we, as a nation, had got into such a pass. In the twenties I had worked for a few years in Wall Street and learned a few things about the Men Who Rule America, according to James W. Gerard. Some time later, after 1929, I did a number of biographical studies of them for a well-known satirical magazine. Yet, what I gathered from these experts and from readings in our financial history led me to consider the money men of the twenties as mere epigones compared with their mighty forebears, the economic dinosaurians who flourished during the latter part of the nineteenth century and gave a special character to their period, so aptly named by Mark Twain the Gilded Age. Thus the idea was conceived of writing a history of the earlier generation of capitalists who had put their stamp so deeply upon our business society. It was my purpose to give an account not only of their lives and their manners and morals, but also of how they got the money.

At that season in 1933 when money itself was disappearing (all the banks having been closed for a while) it seemed as if this whole breed might disappear, or perhaps be reformed beyond recognition. Would such fearsome bulls and bears ever again range over the marketplace as anarchs of all they surveyed? Then, the old barons had such great panache!—with their private palace cars on rails, their imitation-Renaissance Castles, and their pleasure yachts, one of which J. P. Morgan defiantly christened The Corsair. Those kings of railways, those monopolists of iron or pork, moreover, founded dynastic families which Charles A. Beard once likened to the old ducal families of feudal England.

The expanding America of the post–Civil War era was the paradise of freebooting capitalists, untrammeled and untaxed. They demanded always a free hand in the market, promising that in enriching themselves they would build up the country for the benefit of all the people. The Americans of those days had no time for the arts of civilization, as Henry Adams observed, but turned as with a single impulse to the huge tasks of developing their half-empty continent, spanning it with a railway net, and constructing the heavy industrial plant requisite for the new scale of power. All of this was achieved in a climactic quarter-century of our industrial revolution, with much haste, much public scandal, and without plan—under the leadership of a small class of parvenus. These were the aggressive and acquisitive types (much censured by our classic writers and historians) who believed they constituted the survival of the fittest.

Theirs is the story of a well-nigh irresistible drive toward monopoly, which the plain citizens, Congresses, and Presidents opposed—seemingly in vain. The captains or barons of industry were, nevertheless, agents of progress—in the words of their contemporary Marx; under their command our mainly agrarian-mercantile society was swiftly transformed into a mass-production economy. I have tried to give a candid description of their most ruthless actions, their conspiracies and their plunderings; for they accepted no ethics of business conduct; but I have also spoken of their constructive virtues, and sought to picture them as human beings living in their time.

In the crisis years of the 1930’s, economic intervention by the Federal Government was employed on an unprecedented scale, not only in the interests of human welfare, but also to regulate and control the masters of capital who, by their excesses and bad leadership, had helped to bring about the debacle of 1929–1933. At that period a critical literature also arose (of which the present work may perhaps be taken as an example), providing background material to the men of the New Deal.

Of late years, however, a group of academic historians have constituted themselves what may be called a revisionist school, which reacts against the critical spirit of the 1930’s. They reject the idea that our nineteenth-century barons-of-the-bags may have been inspired by the same motives animating the ancient barons-of-the-crags—who, by force of arms, instead of corporate combinations, monopolized strategic valley roads or mountain passes through which commerce flowed. To the revisionists of our history our old-time moneylords were not robber barons but architects of material progress, and, in some ways, saviors of our country. They have proposed rewriting parts of America’s history so that the image of the old-school capitalists should be retouched and restored, like rare pieces of antique furniture.

This business of rewriting our history—perhaps in conformity to current fashions in intellectual reaction—has unpleasant connotations to my mind, recalling the propaganda schemes used in authoritarian societies, and the truth factories in George Orwell’s anti-utopian novel 1984.

A surprising number of the old family dynasties have survived up to the third generation and, despite the tax burdens of the Welfare State, flourish better than ever. The later Rockefellers, Harrimans, Mellons, Whitneys, and Fords are generally more public spirited than their ancestors; their estates have sometimes mounted into the billions, instead of mere millions, during this half-century of great foreign wars and cold war, accompanied by inflation and prosperity. Certain of our revisionist historians seem to have become reconciled to the presence of these monolithic family fortunes as permanent features of our democratic American landscape. The founders of those fortunes were often men of heroic stature, and their days were charged with drama; but though they were often envied they were not loved by the American people. It was not I, but the embattled farmers of Kansas, who, in one of their anti-monopoly pamphlets of 1880, first applied the nomenclature of Robber Barons to the masters of railway systems.

MATTHEW JOSEPHSON

Sherman, Conn.

September, 1962

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

The National Scene: The National Character

THE cannonading that began at Charleston with the dawn of April 12, 1861, sounded the tocsin for the men of the new American union. The fatal clash of the two economic nations within the republic could no longer be escaped; the irrepressible conflict was at hand. When the trivial siege of Sumter was over, the North rallied from its stupor, its breathless waiting. A people who had barely known themselves a nation were unified at last by danger. The North, with a passion no less bitter than the South’s, moved to crush the rebel who had ruled the national policy for generations, and stubbornly barred the way of industrial growth as if he would halt inevitability itself.

In legions, the recruits, the young men of ’61, marched away to Bull Run for the three months’ war. On both sides they were the soldiers of a people without tradition or gift for military heroics; a people which had come out to attend three earlier wars only in small numbers, with remarkable apathy. The frontier democracy had known as little of the rule of the military captain as of the feudal noble or the prince of the Church. Its sons were no soldiers, yet possessed deathless courage; it had few battle leaders; most of these must rise up from disaster. Therefore the conflict would be long, the most stubborn, the most sanguinary in all the history of the West, and colossal in its scale of operations.

If the South did not truly estimate its powers for such a contest, neither did the North know its strength, its wealth, its destiny. Not many in either camp could have pictured the incredible transformations which would accompany those thundering years. And fewer still knew or sensed what the Civil War was really fought for.

The epoch of martial glory and martial stupidity need concern us but little here. We observe only that its grand blood-letting fixes a turning point at which the trend of our history declares itself: the opening of the Second American Revolution, that industrial revolution which worked upon society with far greater effect than the melodramatic battles. After Appomattox, in 1865, it is widely and conveniently assumed, the Old Order was ended.

Had they been Tyrian traders of the year 1000 B.C., landing from a galley fresh from Gibraltar, writes Henry Adams concerning his family’s return from diplomatic duties abroad, they could hardly have been stranger on the shore of a world so changed from what it had been ten years before. All this is true figuratively. But literally the symptoms of the future order of things, all the new shapes and forces existed vigorously in the days of Jefferson, side by side with the institutions and conditions of pre-capitalist or feudal eras. The process of change, the departure from the old ways toward large-scale industry, toward giant capitalism, toward a centralized, national economy, was long in preparing, gradual, and not too imperceptible. When the abyss of the Civil War suddenly yawned before men’s eyes it but registered a lag which had existed already during the whole of the preceding generation. Where England had officially recognized its economic transition peacefully by the repeal of the Corn Laws, America, through blood and iron, consecrated its own industrial revolution by the end of what had been comparatively free trade. . . .

All this we see in retrospect. But besides the young men who marched to Bull Run, there were other young men of ’61 whose instinctive sense of history proved to be unerring. Loving not the paths of glory they slunk away quickly, bent upon business of their own. They were warlike enough and pitiless yet never risked their skin: they fought without military rules or codes of honor or any tactics or weapons familiar to men: they were the strange, new mercenary soldiers of economic life. The plunder and trophies of victory would go neither to the soldier nor the statesman, but to these other young men of ’61, who soon figured as massive interests moving obscurely in the background of wars. Hence these, rather than the military captains or tribunes, are the subject of this history.

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Shortly before or very shortly after 1840 were born nearly all the galaxy of uncommon men who were to be the overlords of the future society. They were born at a historical moment when by an easy effort one could as well look back at the mellow past as scan the eventful future. Their parents could remember the disturbed but very simple and light-hearted times of Mr. Jefferson, when pigs wandered unmolested at the steps of the Capitol; and it was only a comparatively few years since Mr. Jackson had driven the money-changers from the temple.

It was not true of course that the early Republic was a millennium of free farmers and artisans; yet in the simplicity of its organization and of its mercantile economy, the nation belonged almost to a precapitalist age. Over great regions of the country men still worked for a livelihood rather than for money. This man of the mercantile age, certainly contrasted with his successor, a few generations later, did not stand on his head or run on all fours, but was a natural man and in himself was the meteyard of all things. The handicrafts were widespread; little shops and factories were interspersed among the farms of New England. And it was still true, in many parts of the earlier America, that the artisan, as in olden times, loved his work and feared more that it might not be worthy of him than that he might not put a high enough price upon it. It was also true that goods circulated at a slow rate. The ingenious Yankee and his wife wove their cloth, turned their own furniture, molded their own pottery, in a manner now considered quaint but then truly economical. As their traffic in goods and moneys, while limited to narrow regions, was carried on at the pace of the horse-drawn post, the ox-cart, the river or canal vessel, so their opportunities were narrowed, while differences in station were correspondingly moderate. Thus although there were instances enough of large inequalities of wealth and power, there was more individual equality than in other countries. And of the possessors of great fortunes we note that their wealth was based on ownership of land. This was true of New York as of Virginia. In New England and elsewhere along the coast, the shipping trade was the medium of great fortune; but in this commerce too the pace of trade was long-breathed, temperate, at first.

In such spacious and leisurely days the art of politics and the art of rhetoric tended to flourish. Many documents testify to the charm of ideas and talk in the circle of Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin and Marshall, who held forth almost daily in the incompleted presidential palace of the village of Washington. These statesmen were latter-day Romans; in their own eyes, at least, their rôle was high. With an acrid passion, they, and behind them the mass in town dwellings and log cabins, the lowliest immigrants from Scotland and Germany, upheld the notions of the free republic upon which Napoleonic Europe and even English opinion habitually heaped its contempt. Proud of having cast off the incubus of feudal and aristocratic institutions, each toiler with every stroke of the ax and the hoe knew himself a gentleman and his children gentlemen. Where monarchies clerical and temporal and theatrical military adventurers sucked the nourishment of Europe, here was a land where government was simply to be a judicature and a police. In the mind of the tall, negligently dressed but eloquent statesman from Virginia, little more was necessary to make the happiness and prosperity of the people than

a wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Thus, under the lax political institutions, society would be wholly directed by interest, rather than by outworn traditions, or by the appetites of autocrats. Under favoring circumstances the Americans threw themselves into their tasks with a revolutionary zeal. And though Jefferson had hoped that only the agricultural capacities of our country would be furthered, rather than industry which would lead to the mimicry of an Amsterdam, a Hamburg, a city of London, it was soon evident that the outcome was to be a different and unattended one. It was the qualities of trade and industry, in most predatory form, and not the agricultural capacities that flourished in the turbulent laissez-faire society of the frontier democracy. This was one of the first effects that struck the eye Of visiting foreigners, such as Alexis de Tocqueville.

The Americans, and no less the newly arrived immigrants, were soon living in the future, filled with a large excitement over solid mountains of salt and iron, of lead, copper, silver and gold; over cornfields waving and rustling in the sun, over limitless riches, unimaginable stores of wealth and power—none of which the cultured satirists who frequently journeyed here could see. But the poor who came here saw those mountains of gold. These wandering Yankee traders, these projectors, these pioneers and immigrants remembered only how hungry and naked their forbears had been through the centuries, and were ravished by the future. To their minds, every new method which led by a shorter road to wealth, every machine which spared labor, diminished the cost of production, facilitated or augmented pleasure, seemed the grandest effort of the human intellect. Hence the two strains in the national character: political freedom and idealism, abetting a sordid and practical materialism, which asked nothing of ideas, of the arts, and of science, but their application toward ends of use and profit.

When we search for the springs of the national character we can never long forget that the original settlers were English Protestants. In the worshipers of the Reformed Church the individual conscience had been liberated from Catholic and Anglican formula and tradition; was freer to adjust itself flexibly to new hazards and opportunities. Among the New Englanders, for a time, and among the widely scattered Scotch-Irish, Calvinism was dominant and its influence was widespread in nearly all the colonies. And though it was not true that Calvin had introduced usury, as so many suppose, he had recognized its existence more candidly than the Catholic Church; and, as shown by R. H. Tawney, in his Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Calvin liberated the economic energies of the rising bourgeoisie of Europe by his teachings. By the Calvinist scale of moral values, the true Christian must conduct his business with a high seriousness as in itself a kind of religion. By his sober ideal of social conduct the members of the merchant and artisan class, the roturiers, found their soul; saw all careers open to character rather than to the well-born; became wielded into a disciplined social force. Hence the combination of business address and discipline noted among the early New Englanders, as in similar milieux of the mother country whence they came. So many sayings of the time show how among the Reformed, the greater their zeal, the greater was their inclination to trade and industry, as holding idleness unlawful. Others commemorate the amalgam of piety and ruse which made the best of both worlds: "The tradesman meek and much a liar. . . ." We feel in the Puritan type that the will is organized, disciplined, nerved to the utmost, as Tawney concludes; and if his personal life is sober, then it is also true that he enjoys freedom in the deepest sense; he ends by utterly opposing the authority even of church officers to police him; in the end his own individual conscience is his final authority.

For the people of the Reformed Church (as for the Jews) money was long ago the sole means to power. We find early economists in the time of Charles II saying of the nonconformists that none are of more importance than they in the trading part of the people and those that live by industry, upon whose hands the business of the nation lies so much.

The first colonists, then, were brimming with the developed middle-class virtues; their strict sumptuary laws and domestic habits seemed to lead always to diligence, to cheerless self-restraint, and finally culminated in the parsimony and holy economy of the Quakers.¹

Among those who won notable triumphs by pursuing the Puritan economic virtues was no other than the free-thinking Benjamin Franklin who was the son of Puritans; and none more than he was the representative and container of the national character in the early period of the republic. He was Defoe’s wise shopman, his Compleat English Tradesman, for whom trade was not a ball where people appear in masque and act a part to make sport . . . but ‘tis a plain, visible scene of honest life . . . supported by prudence and frugality. It was not for nothing that Franklin, even more than Washington, was held up as model for succeeding generations; indeed he was a paragon for the entire bourgeois world, inasmuch as no man of his time was more widely read than he, millions of copies of his Poor Richard and his Autobiography circulating in scores of languages, in all continents, at the outset of the nineteenth century.² In him, as a result of the long slow process of economic and religious liberation there had crystallized what we may call the bourgeois spirit, as opposed to the feudal; he was the homo economicus of the new times. The usefulness of his virtue and thrift are all the more significant inasmuch as we now have the strongest reasons to believe they were public; for the rest he showed strong tendencies to relapse into little uninjurious vices in private, or when abroad in foreign land. . . .

It was Franklin, philosopher of the new middle class, inventor of a stove and the lightning rod, who lamented that we lose so much time in sleep; who framed the immortal dictum: Time is money; whose whole life was one long worship of holy economy. It was he who wrote:

. . . The way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words, industry and frugality; that is, waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. Without industry and frugality nothing will do, and with them everything. He that gets all he can honestly and saves all he gets will certainly become rich, if that Being who governs the world, to whom all should look for a blessing on their honest endeavors; doth not, in His wise providence, otherwise determine.

Franklin believed that given personal restraint and prudence in the conduct of his affairs, God would oversee the rest. This Yankee was avid of novelty and invention, free of prejudices, ingenious mechanically, skillful with his hands, quick of wit. And, finally, he was respectable, his respectability being designed, as he said candidly, to impress his clients.

In order to secure my character and credit as a tradesman, I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid the appearance to the contrary. I dressed plain, and was seen at no places of idle diversion; I never went out a-fishing or shooting.

This respectability, this honesty toward customers, this conservatism, in good quality, small volume, high prices, was also a strong trait of the earlier capitalism which was already departing toward 1840. The keeping of clients, the avoidance of encroachment upon others’ trade, was part of the atmosphere of those unhurried times which referred back to a world already passing, in which man and his life were the measure of all things and, to a greater extent than ever afterward, of his business.

Franklin, the historic Yankee, the legendary Self-made Man, owed his success as a printer as much to his strict attention to new machinery studied in London as to his good and prudent business management; just as in journalism he owed his success to enterprise in the current of new ideas. Typical of the old order of early capitalism, he was in his own person a man of enterprise, a skilled artisan of nimble and strong hands; he was also a small master who having made his primary accumulations, held command over a little troop of apprentices and craftsmen whose associated toil represented the division of labor which was the momentous contribution of his century.

As in the case of Franklin, so in the other early Self-made Men of the young Republic we may study the naked process of change from the early stages of industrialism to the more advanced. We see Samuel Slater removing from England to the United States at the close of the eighteenth century, carrying in his brain the memory of Richard Arkwright’s machinery designs. Bounties had been offered for power-carding machinery by our government and the ingenious British craftsman by his skill and of course his want of scruples about the pirating and exporting of patents-then forbidden by English law-sets up at Pawtucket the first successful cotton-spinning mill. He is aided, to be sure, by local capital in the person of the pious Moses Brown of Providence who had written to him in 1790:

If thou canst do this thing, I invite thee to come to Rhode Island, and have the credit of introducing cotton-manufacture into America.

So with his own hands the Derbyshire master craftsman had set up numerous mills, employing numerous companies of workmen (whose labor as far as possible in those days was carefully divided into simple, routine motions), and had become by his technical talent a man of great wealth. Together with Moses and Obadiah Brown, the philanthropic Quakers, he had finally become a commander of armies of workmen whose mechanized and accelerated labor produced mountains of cotton and woolen cloth. But note how, while diligent and aggressive, these early masters of capital are godly men as well, giving their tithe to the Lord. Slater established in one of his mills in 1796 a Sunday-school for the improvement of his work people, the first, or among the first, in the United States; while Obadiah Brown, dying childless, left the stupendous sum of $100,000 to Quaker charities.

Thus at a time when most of the great fortunes were yet derived from the ownership of large landholdings, as in the Virginia of Washington or even along the Hudson River Valley, where the descendants of the Dutch patroons lived in feudal state, the first successes in manufacture and in use of natural resources revealed the significant symptoms of the new order of society.

The history of John Jacob Astor, legend of the poor boy risen to riches, was immortalized by Washington Irving in his romance of Astoria and was in everyone’s eye. With empty hands the German butcher’s son had arrived in New York in 1783 and apprenticed himself to a furrier; then with alternate boldness and parsimony made his first important accumulations. He himself had gone up the Mohawk Valley to trade with the Indians; then he had lived in frugal style over his own shop at Broadway and Vesey Street for two decades, he and his wife laboring over the stinking furs and skins, close-fisted, weighing every penny, secretive of his plans as of his possessions, until with his great means he was enabled to expand his trading to the wildest outposts of the frontier. The American Fur Company of Astor ranged in its quest of furs from Missouri to Oregon and farthest Canada. It was not only said that its canny agents were vendors of liquor demoralizing the Indians who brought skins, but according to Congressional reports of 1821–22, even debased the liquors they sold to the aborigines!

Out of the trading posts of drunkenness and misery came much of the great accumulations of an Astor. Then his wealth had been translated into city land, into bonds, into banks, above all, land—so that his heir, William B. Astor, after 1848, was called the landlord of New York. Thenceforth tens of thousands of city dwellers collectively paid tribute to the grandees of the Astor family, which was likened to that of the Rothschilds of Europe.

There were other famous nouveaux riches. Had not Alexander Stewart, arrived in 1823 from Belfast, and dealer in Irish laces and linens, become within several years the lord of a great marble emporium which towered above Broadway and dispensed dry goods of every sort to the multitude? Soon two thousand persons labored in association for the modern merchant prince whose income was above a million a year!

And finally when had the world ever seen the like of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, most astonishing of all the famous parvenus of the 1840’s and 1850’s? The hulking, Silenus-like figure of an old man, in his eternal fur coat and plug hat, winter and summer, with the handsome, bald head, and the profane language of a sea-dog, was known and liked by all New York. Remembered as a Staten Island ferry-boy, untutored, unable to spell correctly, he was the pure type of the modern captain of industry flourishing along the frontier of a new world. He was born of poor Dutch peasants in 1794, when a landed baron and a soldier commanded the republic, and his career spanned the flight of time into a new epoch. At his death, the steamship, the railroad, the magnetic telegraph, the iron and steel industry had worked their changes upon society; changes which even if he did not comprehend them, he had the good fortune to turn to his use eventually, so that he would prosper to a grand old age, to a time that the Jeffersons and Gallatins of his youth could never have dreamed, with his hands always at the levers of the new power. But if Vanderbilt had much of Franklin’s parsimony, he had something of John Hawkins’s ferocity too. Engaged in the shipping trade of New York harbor from boyhood, Cornelius Vanderbilt had known no other school than that of the dock and the forecastle. His herculean strength, his dexterity, his mixture of fierce courage and shiftiness had gradually brought him to the fore as a master of river and coastwise sailing vessels. His early years were filled with long, savage straggle against the dominant Eastern shipping interests, the Fulton-Livingston group, whom he would underbid perpetually in the competition for freight. And since they often had the law on their side in the dispute, Vanderbilt was driven to many wiles at times to avoid process-servers; at others to sudden violent aggressions, worthy of an old-time corsair, whereby his enemies and their minions were overwhelmed.

Possessed of a sharp wharf-rat’s tongue and a rough wit, according to his early biographers, he took joy in combat. His foible was opposition, we are told. Wherever his keen eye detected a line that was making a large profit . . . he swooped down and drove it to the wall, by offering a better service and lower rates—for a time. Then with the opposition driven out, he would raise his rates without pity, to the lasting misery of his clients.

The career of Vanderbilt shows little of that triumphant enterprise or vision for which he; has been applauded so long. As a master of sailing vessels, he despised the newly arrived paddle-wheelers of 1807, holding that they were merely good enough for Sunday picnics. When they proved their value for passenger service, he was among those who insisted that the new steamboats could never be used for freight because the machinery would take up too much room. But when the hazardous experimental period had been survived by the steamship, then he judged the time ripe for intrusion; he had the best steamboats built for his lines and became a dominant factor in the ocean and coastwise trade. In waiting for the steamboat to be perfected, he showed the shrewd capacity of the great entrepreneur whose undertakings are always larger, but tardier, safer and more profitable than those of the early inventor or pioneer.

The heroic period of Vanderbilt was undoubtedly the time of the California gold rush, when he moved heaven and earth to throw a competing line—against the Collins line—by ship and stagecoach across Nicaragua. Here he overcame unheard-of dangers of tide, of native revolutions and filibusters, of tropical heat and plague. In person he drove his men to the breaking point, setting the example for fourteen to sixteen hours a day of sleepless vigilance and labor. In an emergency he once took the helm of the side-wheel steamboat which must be sent up the San Juan River rapids to Lake Nicaragua, firing up the boiler to the utmost. His biographer, Croffut, relates:

Sometimes he got over the rapids by putting on all steam; sometimes . . . he extended a heavy cable to great trees up stream and warped the boat over. . . . The engineers reported that he "tied down the safety-valve and jumped’ the obstructions, to the great terror of the whole party."

But out of the traffic to California he drew the bulk of his sudden fortune, in the ripeness of age. In the 1850’s when American shipping was supreme, he had over a hundred vessels afloat, and earned $100,000 each month. At the time of the shipping subsidy scandals, aired in the Senate in 1858, it was seen that Vanderbilt and E. K. Collins of the Pacific Mail Steamship Line were the chief plunderers, sometimes conciliating, sometimes blackmailing each other. To keep Vanderbilt silent and inactive, while he drew a government mail subsidy of $900,000 a year, and quadrupled steerage rates, Collins paid Vanderbilt the large sum of $56,000 a month. Thus the vigorous old privateer was enabled to boast in 1853 of a fortune of $11,000,000, which he kept invested at 25 per cent.³

But though fabulously rich and engaged in numerous complex undertakings the Commodore carried all his bookkeeping accounts in his own head and trusted no one with them. His own son, William H. Vanderbilt, declared that he knew nothing of his father’s methods. He clung to his wealth. The carpet in his small home on Washington Place was long threadbare; his long-suffering wife, who had lived in a terrible frugality with him, was for a long time denied anything resembling luxury. The nine children she had borne him grew up under a parent now brutally indifferent, now cruel with a fierce parsimony. His eldest son, William Henry, who was to be his heir, a meek and sluggish character, was consigned to a farm on Staten Island until he was of middle age: his father thought him an idiot and often told him so to his face. Another less patient and calculating son, Cornelius, was disowned for his extravagance. His pathetic wife, who at last became permanently distracted, the Commodore finally committed to Bloomingdale Asylum; while at the age of senility he pursued young women insatiably.

In an age of free struggle and fierce competition for power, this old buccaneer, who was almost a septuagenarian at the outbreak of the Civil War, was admired most of all for his unflagging aggressiveness. One incident was generally known of, in which associates had tried to take advantage of his absence upon a European journey to seize control of one of his properties. He wrote them:

Gentlemen:

You have undertaken to cheat me. I will not sue you, for law takes too long. I will ruin you.

Sincerely yours,

Cornelius Van Derbilt.

And he did.

A characteristic expression of his, in another emergency, also became celebrated. What do I care about the law? he had exclaimed. Hain’t I got the power?

In one respect, Vanderbilt foreshadowed the new conceptions of large-scale capitalism in his shipping business. His tactics were often directed to obtaining a great volume of traffic at lower rates than his competitors gave—in any case, until he obtained the upper hand, when he might safely give way to greed again. Once the great shipper Collins reproached Vanderbilt for making the federal government a lower offer for the mail-carrying privilege than seemed necessary. I can’t make it pay as it is, Collins had concluded.

Then you are probably in a business that you don’t understand, rejoined the Commodore.

Vanderbilt, then, combined in himself the new and the old social traits at once. Something of a sea-dog and a pioneer, endowed with physical courage and high energy as well as craftiness, he was the Self-made Man, for whom the earlier, ruder frontier America was the native habitat. At the same time his individual conscience was already free of those prescriptive, restraining codes, as of the habitual prudence of Franklin’s age of early capitalism. Though he kept no complicated books he had the taste for ever larger affairs such as men used to undertake only under the patronage of monarchs. In seeking quickened activity, great volume and lower prices—instead of honest but limited services at high tariffs—he gave intimations of a new personal departure from the older bourgeois order. And though he had succeeded earlier as a craggy pioneer, he learned to employ the capital he possessed in the vast labyrinth of the modern marketplace. In short, he became originally a leader of men and undertakings, an owner of capital, because he was strong; but he learned to thrive in an age when men became commanders of industry because of their command of capital itself.

3

In the arts of buying and selling capital itself men grew both more subtle and more daring. Progress was registered not only in water power and steam engines, but in the rise and spread of joint-stock companies before 1840, in the growth of bourses or exchanges which dealt in such capital. The most notable of these at the time of the Civil War was the Stock Exchange of the City of New York, which by its natural advantages became the seaport and commercial metropolis of the nation. A century earlier, Wall and Water Streets were the haunt of pirates and slave-traders, and especially of the immortal William Kidd; here a market flourished already which differed in no ways from the old ’changes of Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris and London. Out of the neighboring coffeehouses where merchants of the shiftier kind, gamblers, lottery-players, touts and politicians had been wont to gather, the personnel of the marketplace was recruited in the days of the Revolutionary War. Under the shade of a famous old buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street there congregated those shrewd, lynx-eyed, slitmouthed speculator-politicians who participated in the bull movement in continentals of the 1790’s—a crowd bearing a close enough resemblance to the grave, secretive traders who walked in the florence of the Medicis or in seventeenth-century Edinburgh, or on the London Exchange whose stock-jobbers Defoe has described.

Robert Morris had been the leader of the first manipulative campaign for selling dear the rescued government scrip and securities which had been bought so cheap. The stock-jobbers who dealt in these peculiar wares were a perennial, hardy and resourceful race. In good times they did a flourishing business; even before the War of 1812 it often seemed that stock and scrip were the sole subject of conversation among the commercial-minded freemen, as Madison complainingly wrote to Jefferson. The press of the early republic spoke of the raving madness bordering on insanity of the mercantile public. And when the exaltation was succeeded by the cathartic cycle of depression, of tragic disillusionment, the society of brokers which had formed itself in Wall Street showed, ever since 1791, a wonderful poise, a calm detachment toward the public ruin which was to be one of the undying traditions of Wall Street.

The character of the Wall Street market had become definitely fixed after it had housed itself indoors in the Merchants’ Exchange Building at Wall and William Street, with solemn rules, initiation fees, and regular charges to outsiders. All its swift, smooth-running machinery—especially after the introduction of the telegraph—for dealing in pieces or shares of capital, as an open and free securities market were much as they are now, and had the same function. Even the bear had appeared in Jacob Little, who sold stocks short on six months’ options in 1837. And as it is now so Wall Street was then a huge whispering gallery, vibrant with a thousand rumors, fears and passions, emotional and mercurial, or now impassive and inscrutable; a place of restless tides and bewitching calms, or howling hurricanes, a place as unfathomable as the sea, as impenetrable as the jungle.

In the 1850’s another of the picturesque, weather-beaten figures who ruled as a king of the marketplace was Daniel Drew (The Great Bear), sometimes an associate, sometimes rival of Vanderbilt, and no less celebrated than the hardy Commodore. Tall, thin, bearded, rustic and negligently dressed like a drover, Drew was renowned both for his piety and for his terrible market prowess, by which he dominated stock-gambling for almost a generation. This Sphinx of the Stock Market was as suspicious as Vanderbilt, also kept all his accounts in his head and considered the whole paraphernalia of bookkeeping a confounded fraud. Timid and mistrustful, he always believed the worst of men and their business ventures. He said: Never tell nobody what yer goin’ ter do, till ye do it.

Born in 1797, in the village of Carmel, New York, in the rural fastnesses of Putnam County, he had grown up to be a catdtl-drover and lived a life of terrible privation in youth, which may have contributed to his bearish view of life. The cattle that he gathered up from farmers to drive to New York, purchased on credit, he often never settled for, according to the natives of Carmel; a practice which was the cause of his removing the base of his operations as far as Ohio, to him is also credited the invention of watered stock, his cattle being kept thirsty throughout the journey, and only given drink immediately before arrival at the drovers’ market uptown. Once, in bringing cattle at night over the Allegheny Mountains during a lightning storm, a tree had fallen upon Daniel Drew, killing his horse under him. But as Henry Clews relates, No hardships or privations could deter him from the pursuit of money."

After having prospered in the cattle trade by his particular methods he had become the owner of the Bull’s Head Tavern in the Third Avenue drovers’ center; then a moneylender, an owner of Hudson River steamboats, and finally a stockbroker, head of the house of Drew, Robinson & Co., which bought and sold not only bank and steamboat shares, but also the new railroad shares which were already immensely popular in the ’50’s. In 1854 he had loaned the Erie Railroad, of which he was a director, $1,500,000 in return for a chattel mortgage on its rolling stock

The Erie was then a great trunk line, nearly 500 miles long, plying between the harbor of New York and the Great Lakes. It had been built at a cost of $15,000,000, partly through state subsidies; great celebrations, tremendous barbecues, had attended its completion, which was considered an enormous boon for the economy of the country at large as well as one of the marvels of modern science. But its capital had soon been watered until it stood at $26,000,000. Its rickety, lamp-lit trains, its weak iron rails had brought disaster and scandal, such as clung to its whole career; and when Daniel Drew, by virtue of his loans to the company, became its treasurer and master after the panic of 1857, it was soon clear that the flinty old speculator was not in the least interested in the Erie Railroad as a public utility or highway of traffic.

His strategic position gave him intimate knowledge of the large railroad’s affairs which he used only to advance his private speculations. The very decrepitude of the rolling stock, the occurrence of horrendous accidents, were a financial good to the Speculative Director, who used even the treasury of his railroad to augment his short-selling of its own stock

Nevertheless Drew, like Vanderbilt, became a character of renown, possessing a fortune of many millions, a model for the rising generation. His sayings were repeated everywhere and his more famous tricks were rehearsed by younger disciples. There was for instance the handkerchief trick. In an uptown club one hot day, at a moment when he was supposed to be hard pressed in the market, Old Daniel pulled out his proverbial red bandanna handkerchief to mop his brow before sitting down with some fellow speculators. A slip of paper bearing a point, or tip, fell to the floor; a bystander put his foot on it. As Drew left, apparently not noticing the incident, the others pounced upon the piece of paper, which proved to be an order. They bought Erie stock in large quantities, and were soon galled. This is the handkerchief trick

According to Clews he cared not a fig what people thought of him, or what newspapers said. He holds the honest people of the world to be a pack of fools. . . . When he has been unusually lucky in his trade of fleecing other men, he settles accounts with his conscience by subscribing toward a new chapel or attending a prayer meeting. And when unlucky, he would retreat to his house in Bleecker Street, shut himself up, stuff up all the windows, bar all the doors, go to bed, swathe himself in blankets, pray and begin drinking.

For Drew was devoutly religious; and against the view held in money quarters that he never hesitated to sacrifice a friend, illustrated by innumerable anecdotes, his admirers pointed to his genuine piety as refuting his closeness. Had he not given the immense sum of $250,000 to found a Methodist theological seminary in New Jersey? But in truth, it turned out in the end that he had, given only his note, which after many years, in the shifting fortunes of new times, was never to be honored. . . .

At any rate Uncle Daniel Drew, like Vanderbilt, remained a hero, and a mystery to his contemporaries because of his daring, subtle and obscure speculations by which he excelled all others.

4

Upon the customs of the market, upon its principles of negotiation and trading which an Astor, a Vanderbilt, a Drew exemplified, other decisive influences were at work to give them their special American character. Immigrants or natives, these masters of the market soon absorbed the genius of the Yankee. But the Yankee was changing. We must look for him elsewhere than in the foot-worn marketplaces of the civilized East; we must observe the Yankee in process of transformation under the particular climate of the untamed frontier.

The legend of the Yankee Trader also formed a significant part of the composite national portrait, in which the mellow features of Franklin are prominent. . . . He was Uncle Jonathan, or Jonathan Slick or Sam Slick, as Miss Constance Rourke describes him in her recent inquiries into American folklore. He was long and lean and weather-beaten; never passive, he was noticeably out in the world; it was a prime part of his character to be ‘a-doin’.’ He pulled strings, he made shrewd and caustic comments; he ridiculed old values; the persistent contrast with the British showed part of His intention. And to the British especially he had always appeared homely and rapacious, but never slow-witted. If you met him in a tavern and he drew you into a trade, he soon quietly stripped you of everything you had. In the South, superstitious colored folks and even white folks, according to tradition, locked their doors piously at the approach of the long, flapping peddler’s figure.

This ingenious Yankee, quick to adapt himself everywhere, easily extricating himself from situations, and by religion and training profoundly rational, his passions under control, his reason dominating his natural inclinations, plain and pawky, overassertive, selfassured, moving everywhere, had left his mark upon the society and leavened it. But in the give and take of the frontier he was at home naturally; he easily bested all others.

Those who looked for noble savages at the frontier looked in vain. (Two or three appeared in the most sophisticated region of the country, in Concord, outside of Boston, the products of much book-learning.) Freed of the restraints of organized society, at liberty to possess himself of all the riches of nature, the far-wandering Yankee or immigrant pioneer was deeply transformed, but now ennobled. The effect of the frontier movement was a constant in the conditioning of the nation, its recurrent waves and upheavals deeply marking the national character along with the low-church religion and the democratic institutions, until its cycle was ended in 1893.

The American frontier, as Frederick J. Turner holds, was as the outer edge of a wave, the meeting place of civilization and savagery. Here the wilderness mastered the colonist. It finds him a European. . . . It strips away the garments of civilization. So periodically, in the Old Northwest (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois), in the Mississippi Valley, the farther Western prairies and the Pacific Slope, the frontier worked deeply upon the national character. It gave its measure of independence and optimism through the continued advantage of free land and the opportunity of a competency to all.

The immigrant (who came in a swarm of seven millions, between 1820 and 1870, chiefly from Great Britain and Germany), blended his character with that of the far-wandered New England Ulysses. The immigrant, in general, was the most aggressive, the coolest head, the least sentimental among his people, the least fettered by superstition or authority; he had no ties with any place or with the past, but lived only in the future. Having risked all, and crossed the ocean in search of pecuniary gain, he was stayed by few scruples, he feared no loss from a bold stroke. A stranger, like the others all about him, whose past, whose credit was unknown, he often dealt with the others as strangers. Thus, in the rude, loosely controlled commonwealths of the frontier, the pioneer became, as Turner concludes, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant of . . . experience and education, and pressing individual liberty beyond its proper bounds. Here the national character assumed traits of coarseness and strength; it was rooted strongly in material prosperity; it tended toward a unity, a nationalism or Federalism rather than intense sectionalism of spirit; it would be lax in its business honor, its government affairs; it set at a premium acquisitiveness (crying always anew for free land) under a Jackson, a Lincoln, a Grant; it showed an inventive grasp of material things, it ranged to lawlessness and violence in the predations of those who sought either to brave the natural elements or to best each other.

The Yankee Trader, puritan though he was, and imbued with the Poor Richard principles of a mercantile capitalism, underwent a sea-change at the frontier, as Turner suggests. Civilized yesterday, he became half-savage in the wilderness, the deserts, the mountain gullies. To the traits of parsimony and prudence and calculation must be added those protective ones of force, swiftness and animal cunning, something of the muffled bound of the wild beast Else he was lost, trampled over, in the rush for the gold fields or the town-site claims.

In the recurrent, frenzied waves of land speculation, gold rashes and railroad booms, you saw the American at work, at his best and at his worst, prospector, pioneer, trader and settler.

Were I to characterize the United States, writes an English traveler, William Priest, as early as 1796, it would be by the appellation of the land of speculations. The very Fathers of the Republic, Washington, Franklin, Robert Morris and Livingston and most of the others, were busy buying land at one shilling or less the acre and selling it out at $2, in parcels of 10,000 acres or more. The very occasion of choosing a site for a National Capitol had been the outcome of collusion between the great land-grabbers, securities speculators, and the statesmen. Even before 1800 land offices were opened up, orators harangued the populace and sold shares or scrip, lots and subdivisions to settlers, often without deed or title. Cities like Cincinnati and Cleveland were laid out in the trackless wilderness and jobbed.Remember that lot in Buffalo! cried the land-jobbers. Remember that acre in Cleveland! that quarter-section in Chicago! Only promptness, speed, enthusiasm, vision were needed to wrest such a fortune as an Astor had taken from his acres in Putnam County, New York

But though it was true that land speculations had given rise to the greatest fortunes in America up to about 1840, it was also true, as another distinguished foreigner remarked toward 1800, that they have . . . been the cause of total ruin and disastrous bankruptcy. In 1795 the first great and typical panic had swept through the country with the failure of Robert Morris’s colossal land projects. Such cruel disillusionments were to occur again and again. Yet mindless of all this the roving Americans, as Emerson wrote to Carlyle, were bent only upon their sections and quarter sections of swamp-land, kept the country growing furiously, town and state . . . new Kansas, new Nebraskas, looming these days . . . vicious politicians seething a wretched destiny for them already in Washington. The pioneer kept moving westward toward the moving frontier, much as Mark Twain’s Si Hawkins and his family, shiftless, voluble and happy-go-lucky, moved along, from Kentucky to Missouri, where numberless acres could be bought at $2 apiece.

But some day people would be glad to get it for twenty dollars, fifty dollars, a hundred dollars an acre! What should you say to (here he dropped his voice to a whisper and looked anxiously around to see that there were no eavesdroppers) a thousand dollars an acre!

Such was the legend of the land boom, faithfully caught in The Gilded Age by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner.

The sequel to the Mexican War was an orgy of land-grabbing and speculation in which the origin of the war is not hard to trace. A young army-officer of engineers, Grenville Dodge, later to be a distinguished general and railroad-builder, writes: I can double any amount of money you’ve got in six months. . . . To start with buy a couple of Mexican War land warrants.

More illuminating still was it to see the frontiersman in the railroad boom of the ’40’s and ’50’s. You saw him scheming, sometimes in collusion with men of capital, or with men of politics, to open the markets of inexhaustible coal fields or untold millions of feet of lumber. Along the right of way of the new railroad line, as along the canal lines a decade or so earlier, the directors would purchase town sites in the prairies. Thus when in 1850 the Illinois Central Railroad was awarded a vast land grant by the federal government of 2,600,000 acres in alternate sections between Chicago and Mobile, the affair was looked upon primarily as a land-jobbing project, Abraham Lincoln, heading